My father was an ethical man. He had integrity, was honest and loathed needless cruelty. He was also a meat-eater’s meat-eater...His habit killed him in the end: the first sign of trouble came with gout, then colon cancer, heart problems and strokes, but he enjoyed meat for decades before all that "wretched bother" in a time when ethical issues were raised only by "a handful of Hindus and Grahamists."

In vitro meat is real meat, grown from real cow, chicken, pig and fish cells, all grown in culture without the mess and misery, without pigs frozen to the sides of metal transport trucks in winter and without intensive water use, massive manure lagoons that leach into streams or antibiotics that are sprayed onto and ingested by live animals and which can no longer fight ever-stronger, drug-resistant bacteria. It comes without E. coli, campylobacter, salmonella or other health problems that are unavoidable when meat comes from animals who defecate. It comes without the need for excuses. It is ethical meat. Aside from accidental roadkill or the fish washed up dead on the shore, it is perhaps the only ethical meat.

Wait, so it's a really unhealthy substance that causes cancer, heart disease, strokes, and gout, so we should grow it in the lab? Sure it might not have "misery" or e. coli, but as they said, it's still meat. At least doctors like Campbell, Fuhrman, Ornish, etc. make sense when they say we should go meat-free, because they say that meat is bad for you and you just shouldn't eat it. I'd personally take lentils any day over lab-grown meat, considering that plain-protein grown in the lab is going to probably be as flavorless as textured vegetable protein (and will need additives in order to taste decent) and at least lentils have been bred for flavor. The inclusion of this essay makes the contest seem even more insincere than it already did.

While I've been acused of doing otherwise, I did not chose to become an omnivore again because of taste. In fact, I had no idea how to cook meat and it took me several years to really get into it and like it. I LOVE hummus, falafal, sambar, dal and all kinds of veggie dishes. I was always perfectly happy eating those things, but my stomach was a wreck all the time. I still love them and have to be careful when I do eat them. In NYC I maintained an expensive addiction to Organic Avenue's raw falafal, which at least didn't seem to cause the inflammation the conventional fried falafal seems to trigger for me.

Which essay is your favorite and why? What do you think of the contest so far? I liked the holistic ecological view of Sometimes It’s More Ethical to Eat Meat Than Vegetables. Of course mathematically, the likely winner is the vat-grown meat essay because it will get all the anti-real meat votes, whereas people without that agenda are likely to fragment amongst the somewhat similar other five.